Most of the your activity of this course will be organized in your own personalized web page called a web log and otherwise known as a blog. This is a specialized web page that is set up on a server that is accessible over the Internet.

There are many companies that offer blogging applications but the one that we will start with is a Google application called Blogger. Other popular blogging platforms are Wordpress and Typepad but there are many hundreds of others.

I chose Blogger because Google has put together many free applications that work very well and work well together. Google also has a system whereby once you register for one service (like Gmail) you automatically have a Google account that you can use for many other things, like Blogger, Google Docs, Google scholar etc. We will look at many other services but start with some Google applications.

Setting up your blog with Google's Blogger is free, 't require that you download any software and is pretty easy. Go to https://www.blogger.com/start

Follow the steps listed on that page and use your alias as the name of your blog. If you are logged in to Gmail when you open Blogger, it should recognize that you are already registered with Google and that will make things simpler.You can create many blogs for other purposes but you should start one just for this course.

Blogs have become very popular in education and many teachers are using them very effectively for a variety of purposes. We will be exploring many of theses uses and trying some of them. You will be using your own personal blog as an electronic portfolio for your work in this class.
Here is a blog by a Manitoba teacher, Clarence Fisher who teaches in Snow Lake. His blog is called Remote Access .